Bradley Cooper’s ‘Maestro’ Is a Solid Conductor of Ego and Electricity

Several reels into Bradley Cooper’s manically over-orchestrated Maestro, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein (Cooper and Carey Mulligan) glide into their immaculate 1950s New York living room for a remote interview for CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person show.

We’re still in the black-and-white half of the film, and the alabaster curlicues spiraling from the century’s more stylish and dexterous chain-smokers distract momentarily from Murrow’s question about the attractions of composing versus conducting music. Be advised this is not an isolated occurrence: Every single shot in this movie calls attention to itself with the subtlety of a blast of French horns.

The crux of Maestro lies in Bernstein’s answer. He describes composition as a creative, private act (in a word, art) and conducting as a public performance. Film directors who write their own screenplays (in a word, auteurs) frequently describe a similar dichotomy, with the “public” aspect consisting of collaboration in production.

Cooper and co-screenwriter Josh Singer have conceived and structured Maestro (opening Wednesday, Nov. 22 in theaters before debuting Dec. 20 on Netflix) to highlight the tensions and contradictions between the charismatic public figure of Leonard Bernstein — an ambitious and acclaimed wunderkind who became a full-fledged star and household name — and the private man: an artist frustrated by his insufficient number of high-art compositions, a loving husband and father, and a lover of men.

That’s a symphony in itself, yet Cooper also ascribes near-equal prominence to Felicia Montealegre, the Costa Rican stage (and later, television) actress who was married to Lenny from 1951 to 1978. Presumably the filmmaker wants to avoid the misogynist (i.e., old-school) biopic portrayal of the wife as incidental to the main subject’s success.

An admirable sentiment, but the screenplay’s vagueness about Felicia downplaying her ambitions (a mix of discomfort with the attention, I gathered, devotion to her husband’s rocketing career and the arrival of children) only thickens the movie’s photogenic muddle. Mulligan doesn’t seem to have a fix on the character either, showing off an assortment of tics and wigs, girlish giggles and demure smiles that obscure rather than reveal.

Much later, after our initial middling interest in Felicia has been stymied and squandered, Cooper provides Mulligan with any number of monologues and close-ups. The older Academy voters who stick around ‘til the end of the flamboyantly melodramatic Maestro may be sufficiently moved to tip Mulligan in the Oscars sweepstakes, so there’s that.

Which brings us to Bradley Cooper’s showy lead performance, a hyperactive and often entertaining fount of bravado that is inseparable from the movie. Cooper’s original impulse as a writer and director may have been to explore the yin and the yang of Bernstein’s public and private lives, but what emerges to define the film is a different tug of war — between art and ego.

I don’t think that’s the issue Cooper wants us to engage with, but by the end of Maestro we can’t escape it. His character is in nearly every scene, and in almost every one of those scenes he is the focus and the engine. It’s all about him, even in those rare moments when he’s off-screen.

To paraphrase Plato (or was it David O. Selznick?), must a movie about a narcissist be narcissistic? You may deduce I’m not entirely talking about Bernstein now. My problem with Maestro is that I frequently couldn’t distinguish between the character and the director. That is, when the film thought it was telling us something about Bernstein I wondered if, in fact, Cooper’s choices — the composition of shots and the storytelling — were revealing more about himself.

Consider the numerous concert scenes populated by hundreds of people in various modes of dress. They aren’t presented as music lovers or art aficionados — the performances aren’t for or about them. They are staged as backdrops for Bernstein’s seemingly insatiable need.

At the same time, they are elaborate, expensive recreations filled with costumed extras hired to fulfill the director’s vision — or should I say ego? That I wasn’t completely certain that the purpose of those scenes was to convey Bernstein’s pleasure is a small problem.

The real Bernstein made a poignant appearance last year in Tár, Todd Field’s galvanizing fictional portrait of a contemporary female conductor and composer (Cate Blanchett). Bernstein was cited as her beloved mentor, and at a low point she watches one of his Young People’s Concerts televised in the 1960s.

Tár had been inspired by Bernstein’s talent for making classical music accessible to mass audiences, and especially by his ability to educate. After seeing Maestro, though, it strikes me that Tár’s problems stemmed from her adopting Lenny’s sense of entitlement and impunity as well.

In Maestro, Bernstein is not publicly bisexual but he is uncommonly indiscreet for a married man. Yet somehow Felicia is unaware until she catches him making out with a new arrival at a party several years into their marriage. (There are several party scenes, replete with cigarettes, if you want a hit of New York society at particular points in time.)

The movie doesn’t suggest that Bernstein has a strong sexual appetite, so it isn’t physical desire that drives him but the need to attract, seduce and dominate. And because he is Lenny, and he is widely acknowledged as a musical genius, all will be forgiven.

Ultimately, Maestro is Cooper’s demand to be taken seriously as an artist (which was not Bernstein’s problem, to be clear). We haven’t seen a declaration quite like this from a Hollywood leading man who fancied himself an auteur since Warren Beatty, who at least had the ability to laugh at himself.

But why stop there? Cooper’s real inspiration isn’t Leonard Bernstein so much as Orson Welles, the original (aside from Chaplin) actor, writer and director. Welles had a pretty high opinion of himself, it must be said, though like Bernstein, he was an artist.

‘Maestro’ opens in theaters on Nov. 22 and streams on Netflix starting Dec. 20.